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As a project, anti-capitalism has seen immense intellectual energy expended in its name. It can claim some of the most brilliant thinkers of modernity.

Despite this, in terms of outcomes things have largely been miserable. There’s all the genocides, police states, and conquests that were justified in the name of socialism or communism. But as bad as all those are, I think what makes it all the worse is the fact that the contemporary Left is simply directionless. This disorientation can be seen in the two broad orientations that most contemporary Leftists take toward the world.

First of all, some Leftists claim we should adopt some prior approach that was tried in the past. The problem, they argue, with the prior approach was that those who tried it either got unlucky, were subverted, or didn’t try hard enough. So while they’ll include some patches to fix now obvious problems that previous generations overlooked like queer liberation or environmentalism, they assume that things have largely been figured out and that we just need to execute on prior ideas. Social democrats, tankies, and doctrinaire syndicalists would be my go-to examples of this category.

Then there’s a minority who recognize and point out significant problems with the strategies of the latter group but don’t have a serious alternative. You know you’re reading a figure from this set when they spend pages detailing all the various ways things are bad, only to end their essay or book by imploring the reader to hold out a vague hope that something else might be possible, but with no real specifics about that is or even how we get there. While some of these figures have tried to put forward something more comprehensive, progress remains painfully slow. A group like the Endnotes collective is a good example of this type.

When it comes to the most rigorous contemporary Leftists, it seems that the best plan that anyone can come up with is that someone should really come up with a plan.

But, despite this history of political failure, the Left has nonetheless seen considerable success when it comes to shifting intellectual assumptions. In disciplines that deal directly with society – history, sociology, anthropology, etc – the median opinion of scholars has moved far to the Left relative to where they were at the beginning of the 20th century. This is even the case in “conservative” fields like economics – see how most economists are broadly in favor of “progressive” policies like anti-discrimination laws or wealth redistribution. Certainly in this drift many only went so far as to become progressive Liberals. But the fact we still see any broad drift is significant.

Particularly because the long-term intellectual shift did not come about because of the Left's political success. Events like the Russian Revolution brought Marxism momentary credibility, but this was undermined by events like the invasion of Hungary, the revelations about Stalin, the Sino-Soviet split, and, of course, the fall of the Soviet Union. Over the course of the 20th century, the failures of socialist states and movements were far more damaging to the Left. The intellectual impact of the Left is arguably all the more impressive because it happened in spite of all the calamities of Leftist politics.

The strength of Leftist ideas can be seen in the sea change that occurred in the 2010s in terms of popular political identification. For roughly two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the radical Left was a small number of activists and academics largely disconnected from the rest of society. Then in the span of a decade, we’ve seen a dramatic explosion in the number of people who identify as Leftist and a broader popularization of Leftist ideas that has forced a reckoning by the broader culture.

Certainly, some of this is a simple reaction to economic downturn and precarity. But there’s plenty of explanations for why things are bad that aren’t Leftist. To become popular, Leftist ideas had to win out over these alternatives. This success is a consequence of the fact that there is something to these ideas, that such models of the world are (generally) better than alternatives, and that the increasing prevalence of the internet made them accessible in a way they just weren’t before.

And sure many are drawn to the Left for other reasons, a sense of community or status hierarchies, and have no real desire to actually understand or change things. But again if that was the only motivation, it’s doubtful you’d get so many people drawn to something as specific as “The Left”. After all, people can and do achieve similar things through other ideologies or even fandoms.

Yet there are clear limits to mere persuasion and outreach. And while there’s still the possibility of further radicalization, it’s doubtful we’ll see a similar wave of radicalization for at least a generation.

Part of this is simply that some people don’t really care. But what about those who are politically engaged? Why have they not been convinced?

Well, a significant factor is that, at present, politics is a domain where, to some degree, what people believe determines the outcome, a domain where magical thinking can sorta work. Convince the right people of something and it will result in consequences in the world regardless of whether those ideas are true. This is the implicit strategy of many movements: the ideas, and slogans they spout might reflect reality, but that's secondary to drawing people in, to get them to believe something.

What rarely gets considered, at least openly, is the seemingly logical conclusion to this approach – does the truth actually matter? If, in the final analysis, the only thing that counts is the number of people devoted to the cause, just stop fucking around and maximize that – build or join a cult!

It’s easy – shower newcomers with praise, affection, and attention, frequently have members undergo demanding tasks with each other to forge solidarity, create a closed-off social space where outside information is viewed with suspicion, and encourage members to take part in rituals that build a sense of communion. This is well-trod territory: great empires and churches have been built off of it and many era-defining movements of modernity are but continuations of this venerable tradition.

But not all of them. There’s something else going on.

The fact that the Left exists at all is the strongest rejoinder to going all-in on cults. Historically, the Left has only had a fraction of the resources that its opponents have been able to muster. So if it was just a game of mobilization, Left movements would have been a footnote in history. And while the results of Left movements are questionable, the mere fact the Left has dramatically shaped the course of history not just once, but time and time again despite its underdog status, is the clearest rejoinder that going all-in on cults is not a dominant strategy.

So why is it that the side that is under-resourced and also openly threatens the status quo nonetheless has been so successful?

Unsurprisingly, it has something to do with Leftists understanding the world better. A better understanding doesn’t just let you win arguments and convince people to your side, it also gives you a strategic edge over adversaries who lack such an understanding.

But why then is the Left favored intellectually? The null hypothesis when it comes to understanding and ideology should be that there is no correlation, that insights are distributed fairly evenly between adherents. So what explains this clustering?

Well, I believe that certain aspirations are more conducive toward understanding the world than others.

This has to do with the nature of decision-making. Acting in the world is not a trivial matter. This is because when taking action there is an uncountable number of considerations that you could potentially involve in your decision-making calculus. A major part of effective action in the real world is being able to slice away what is and isn’t relevant so that you can make problems tractable. A significant part of solving any serious problem is describing it in a way that makes it possible to work on and that process isn’t obvious. Meaningful problems in life are not homework where you merely plug the question into a formula or procedure and solve it.

Certainly for a great many problems this process can be offloaded to heuristics that are the result of cultural and/or evolutionary accumulation. But for problems that do not fit into our inherited “common sense” or have not yet been proceduralized via cultural and/or technical development, more self-conscious engagement is necessary.

To figure out how to describe a problem means to make decisions, conscious or not, about what you think is important. This inherently means that one’s values shape what solutions you are drawn to, but are also called into question when you act.

But our values are not fixed. They are formed out of experience with the world. Yes, our biological inheritance shapes things in a semi-predictable fashion, but a significant part of being human is our capacity to aspire to things beyond the inclinations handed down to us via evolution, to not just uncritically take what is given, but to aspire to or reject certain inclinations that are well outside our evolutionary lineage.

Sometimes this is done through conscious reflection on what we want, other times it is forced upon us by external factors. Regardless because values are formed in part out of information and experiences, that means new information and experiences can shift them.

Yet most people resist this. And a significant reason why has to do with one's sense of self. Your aspirations are a significant part of who you are and changing them calls into question both our past and future. To change your values potentially means calling into question important moments in your life in a way that can be incredibly uncomfortable. But it also calls the future into question. Grounding your day-to-day activity in some broader narrative about your life helps you figure out what to do and without that it’s easy to feel lost.

So when people talk about being “lost” after experiencing something that forces a significant reassessment of their life and what they want to do with it, I think there’s a very literal way to take that. Reassessment is emotionally and intellectually demanding and it’s understandable why people turn away from doing the work.

However, by maintaining false beliefs to reassure your sense of self, you limit your capacity to act in the world. And while there are many false beliefs that are minor and inconsequential it’s hard to know which are which without fully considering things. For example, consider that to have a world where something simple as safety matches no longer work would require dramatic reconfiguration of chemistry at least for us to have life as we know it. As a consequence of this it’s rare that when countervailing evidence arises that challenges a single belief you hold, that it’s just that belief which is called into question.

But not all aspirations are so fragile. A straightforward example of a desire that is not threatened by inquiry is “I want to understand the world”. Unless the universe turns out to be a Lovecraftian horror that drives all who delve too deep into its mysteries insane, this is an aspiration that you can use to orient yourself regardless of context.

What other values and aspirations people would arrive at given sufficient consideration and engagement with the world is an open question. Yet I think in the political realm we see straightforward correlations between broad aspirations and their willingness to engage with the world that I think points to a deeper structure.

The most clearcut example of a refusal to engage is the widespread anti-intellectualism that typifies Conservatism. The stupidity of rank-and-file Conservatives is a phenomenon long-commented on and has only become more clear thanks to the internet. Most Conservative arguments aren’t really arguments meant to convince outsiders, rather the point is that they’re sufficiently complex such that succinctly refuting them is impossible and so believers can easily dismiss critics, while disinterested observers can assume both sides are more or less equal since there’s no straightforward answer.

What gets brought up less is how conservative and reactionary “intellectuals” almost always lean on anti-intellectual arguments in their justifications for hierarchy.

This goes all the way back to figures like Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre responding to the French Revolution. They located the source of the bloodshed in not just the involvement of the uppity masses in politics, but the hubris of philosophers and radicals who dared to question the monarchy. It was not just connectivity brought about by urbanization enabling the public to organize more effectively or the incompetent policies of the regime or just bad luck, no they believed that it was skepticism about the ruling order that had been the decisive factor. In their calls for reestablishing the monarchy they centered curtailing thinking as central.

Variations on these moves have been repeated ever since. In the arguments conservatives and reactionaries make, they will inevitably stress limits to understanding, which in turn justifies some arbitrary order that would collapse under scrutiny. This is even true for those who try to naturalize hierarchies by making empirical claims about the world. Even when they get at a meaningful discrepancy, they always downplay or deny the degree to which this discrepancy is something that is open to change.

The current freakout about transgender people is a clear example of the limits. Gender divisions have long been a wellspring for hierarchies thanks to basic biological discrepancies allowing for the emergence of power imbalances (which many cultures were successful at balancing through social practices). Yet the basic struggle for morphological freedom, which transgender/genderqueer people are at the forefront of, will, if successful, utterly demolish any argument for patriarchal relations that appeal to biology. As our capacity for self-transformation improves, the only remaining justification for patriarchy is that the exercise of domination is valuable in and of itself.

And so despite their pretense towards “rationality”, those who try to justify inequalities as “natural” are inevitability driven to embrace conspiracies about how scientists and researchers are brought off and/or browbeaten into compliance, that interventions which turn people away from their supposedly “natural” inclinations can only cause individual and collective ruin regardless of the evidence that suggests otherwise.

Things get more complicated when we consider Liberals and Leftists.

Certainly, Liberals have plenty of blindspots when it comes to various oppressions that arise not from poor policy or malicious actors, but from deeper ways that society is structured. And so a venerable line of attack by many Leftists against Liberals is that they agree with the stated goals of Liberals, just that there are structural barriers to the world they want. Therefore if they are serious, they should seek the radical transformation of society.

Yet I don’t think the failure of sincere Liberals to become more radical is just that they are cowards or intellectually inconsistent. Rather I think their small-c conservatism of today’s Liberals is an understandable response to the failures of the Left. Given both the wreckage the Left has caused and its failure to present a serious path forward, it is entirely rational to conclude it isn’t a viable project. Particularly since reform is possible. I sincerely think if we tried we could get meaningful welfare or environmental or employment legislation passed that would seriously move the needle on things.

Nonetheless I reject this path because it can only reach a local optima because some victories can only ever come through significant structural change. And, because a movement that is built around winning reforms looks quite different from one aimed at deeper change, there is a fundamental opportunity cost to embracing one or the other.

What’s essential to understand is that this lack of answers on the Left is a historically contingent phenomenon – the present disorientation we see is in no way a likely outcome of emancipatory aspirations. Rewind the clock to 1900, change a couple variables ever so slightly and the last century probably goes very differently. And I’m not just talking about wildly different political developments, but also intellectual developments. Many popular ideas on the Left got that way not because of superior argumentation and analysis, but rather because of political expediency. The most clear-cut example here is how the Soviet Union encouraged various forms of Leninism, both by mass producing and distributing literature but also by directly sponsoring various communist parties across the world. We might also point to the perverse incentives of academia as another factor, which encourages both novelty for the sake of novelty, but also the creation of an unnecessary canon. There are plenty of other factors, but I see these as the most substantive.

The intellectual stasis across so much of the Left today is a consequence of an unspoken assumption many on the Left hold, is that we’ve more or less mapped the space of debate. And on the face of it, it’s not unreasonable to assume that further intellectual progress will be minor. There are so many significant Leftist intellectuals who’ve debated on so many things that you can spend a lifetime tracing out the arguments. Given this complexity, it’s not unreasonable to assume that people more or less figured out the big picture and that the only thing left is to get the details right.

To understand the world it is not enough to just throw enough researchers at the problem. Underlying assumptions and broader culture one is matter immensely for inquiry. The number of possible models of the world is infinite and so any approach to inquiry that hopes to exhaustively brute force them is, outside of contexts that are already well-mapped, dead on arrival.

If it’s at all possible that we might yet construct theories of the world that are significantly better than what came before and if our strategies are derivative from understanding, then the quiet despair born of depressive stasis is not intellectually justified. The claim that “it’s easier to imagine the world than the end of capitalism” is best understood not a consequence of totalizing capitalist victory, but rather a failure of Leftists to do the fuckin work.

While I have specific thoughts about what alternative models of capitalism should replace Marxism, I am less interested in my particular vision winning out than I am in creating a culture of open inquiry. First and foremost I’m interested in what’s right and so if someone can present a better model, I’ll embrace it.

However, I do think that there are some basic dynamics that I think will be a major part of strategies against capitalism. I’ve already laid out one dynamic, the linkage between values, capacity for understanding (a connection I suspect goes much deeper than mere human psychology and could very well apply to anything we might call a “mind”), and how this pushes people toward particular political aspirations.

I’d like to posit another: namely the complexity of emancipatory politics relative to other political aspirations.

A world where everyone is meaningfully free is one where there is simply more happening and so there’s far more you have to account for. Certainly, there’s a lot of unnecessary complexity under capitalism that could be foregone, but any serious movement toward meaningful freedom will see increases in complexity in other domains. The clearest example of this is how actually-existing stateless societies maintain themselves. They are not characterized by Rousseauian innocents who avoid centralized authority through ignorance that it could ever be built, but rather a wary population who goes out of their way to actively frustrate and prevent the emergence of such.

This challenge is further amplified by the dearth of empirical data. We have a wealth of evidence of what different types of societies based on hierarchical relations look like and so it’s just easier to imagine how they might shift in the face of further changes. We can’t say the same for more egalitarian relations because there just isn’t the same data set. Sure we can draw some insight from anthropology and archeology of stateless societies, as well as fringe communities and subcultures, but you can’t just extrapolate those into a globalized mass society.

One basic reason the reactionaries are doing so well right now is that they just have less questions to answer.

But it isn’t just that there are more problems to solve. It’s also that playing to our strengths demands more of us. It’s all very well to know more than your adversaries in an abstract sense, but figuring out how to leverage that asymmetry is challenging. To get inside someone’s adversaries head, to figure out what they don’t know, and then do the work of applying your knowledge in a way that they’ll struggle with or won't see coming far more work than just going with obvious approaches.

These two asymmetries are my answer to the apparent inconsistency between the structural intellectual superiority of the Left and its disastrous political history. Sure those who desire emancipation might have an edge in terms of our potential. But if we don’t do the work to build and utilize that potential then that edge does not exist. And while I can't know how effective a movement that takes understanding seriously could be until they exist, I rate the odds of emancipatory movements that don’t do this work as extremely low, like a 1-in-100 chance of success at best.

So what stops people from reorientating toward a politics that takes this seriously?

The most simple constraint is basic poverty. Serious intellectual engagement is demanding and requires free time and a lack of pressing concerns. The cognitive constraints that come with stress, malnutrition, disease, etc are very real. While people are still capable of reasoning in such contexts, we see a narrowing of horizons and concerns to immediate matters instead of broader considerations.

However the threshold for overcoming these issues is low. Once someone is relatively comfortable these problems largely solve themselves or at least become far more tractable. Moreover, it’s not like this is some new concern – we’re already fighting for people to have better living standards and this is just one more reason to do it.

Where a lack of resources matters more is when it comes to connectivity and outreach. While the internet has certainly broken down some of the barriers to distribution and conversation, things could be better. There’s so much information to sort through that people turn to centralized mechanisms that filter for them. These have all sorts of problems, the most notable of which is that we lack the ability to finely tune who they interact with. Constant risk of context collapse encourages superficial and/or hostile conversational styles because of the constant risk of being misunderstood or attacked means people are on their guard. While there are other concerning top-down tendencies at play like censorship or addictive design, I think that this is a far more pressing issue because it emerges out of the simple act of interacting with one another.

However, the present configuration of the internet is in no way a natural outcome of building out information technology. Indeed there are good reasons to think that the present way the internet is configured has significant economic flaws that make it unsustainable in the long run – see for example how the economics of advertising that underpin existing social media are questionable or the questionable economics of existing infrastructure.

While contesting what is and creating something new is a significant task, communication infrastructure independent of capital and the state is something any serious emancipatory movement in the 21st century should treat as a bare minimum. I shouldn’t have to explain the tactical value of real-time communications that can’t be easily shut down or monitored. Facilitating more productive conversations is just one more reason to do it.

There’s also the way ideas themselves are presented. At present most people are expected to grasp Leftist arguments through reading a specific canon (look at the reading lists promoted by any given Leftist org). That’s bad. People can be turned off by any number of things that aren’t the actual arguments being presented: the author’s writing style, emotional associations, bad analogies, whatever.

Instead, we should aspire to have as many ways as possible to help people reach particular insights, ideally building up bespoke arguments tailored for specific subcultures or communities that speak their language to minimize friction, ideally utilizing all forms of multimedia – text, audio, video, gamification, chatbots, etc.

To do this effectively means moving away from the style of writing that is common in the worst parts of academia and the Left, wherein specific texts and thinkers are taken as being singular points of genius to be endlessly studied and commented on. We should aspire to something much closer to the hard sciences and mathematics where insights can and frequently are disconnected from their creators and be argued “as they are”, bringing in context and lineage only when necessary.

But none of this touches what I see as the central barrier, namely the emotional and intellectual demands of inquiry. People who’ve devoted years of their lives and/or sacrificed considerably for a set of ideas and ideals are understandably reluctant to give them up. Admitting that years or potentially decades of your life were spent in a counterproductive or wasteful fashion just sucks and is made all the worse if it calls friendships or relationships into question.

Yet despite all these barriers, I’m confident that if discourse can play out – so no worldwide fascist takeover or civilizational collapse – within a generation or two an emphasis on the strategic benefits that come from superior understanding and the linkage between understanding and emancipatory politics will be commonsensical among most radicals. And I would not be surprised if it happened quicker.

The reason is that despite all the barriers, at the end of the day, there are people who want to change the world and they’ll be drawn to things that, at the end of the day, just work. When I talk to Leftists engaged in activism who’ve not fallen for some cult, I find people motivated by a desire to do something, anything, that might meaningfully impact the world and so they go with whatever seems superficially effective. They’re drawn to a pre-existing ideology not because they looked at an extended meta-analysis which compared various models of what capitalism is and how to fight it and then made an informed decision. Rather they wanted to get shit done and so went with what was on offer instead of looking deeper.

Given the state of the world and Leftist discourse, who can blame them?

Which is why my theory of change for how to knock the Left out of its rut is not by engaging in some debate with various established thinkers, most of whom are entrenched in various positions after a lifetime of identifying them. Rather it’s to do basic outreach to activists with simple memes like “our political opponents are systematically ignorant and we can leverage that ignorance” or “we who desire emancipation can understand the world far better than those who don’t”.

In no small part because many have already partially grasped these asymmetries because they work. What I’m doing here is merely providing a more systemic account of the dynamics at play that lets people think more thoroughly about what’s going on and why they emerge by attempting to put into words what many have already partially figured out through hands-on action. More conscious recognition of these structural asymmetries will hopefully result in people exploiting them more effectively, which should result in imitation and learning. Eventually it should hit a tipping point where all this is more or less common sense.